Fueling Healthier Generations: The Good Food Guide Unveiled

Public health experts believe that the Coronavirus pandemic was a consequence of our dystopian relationship with nature. They also caution that children of today are at a risk of shorter life expectancy than their parents, if the unhealthy practices of food production and marketing driving an epidemic of overweight and obesity, diet-related cardiovascular illness, diabetes, and cancers, are not checked.

An aggregate method for confronting the impending risk the world faces is to figure out the link between people, other species, and their shared environment. That human health is the single greatest driver for change in ecological management, is brought out well by Dr. K. Srinath Reddy in his new book Pulse to Planet (HarperCollins). He has put together the knowledge of science, medicine, and public health to explain the social and commercial determinants of planetary health and how nature and nutrition promote a healthy world.

Unless we come to an obvious conclusion of our health and food with the health of the planet, the luxury of good healthy living may be more challenging in the future, the book underlines.

During National Nutrition Week, the book comes as an ideal indication of how to secure long-term healthy living by looking past science, beliefs, behavior, genetics, and the internal workings of the body and understanding how complicatedly these are connected to the environment.

The author, as a clinician cardiologist, and public health expert, long recognized the interconnected value of health for people and society as a whole and believes that nutrition problems, societal maladies, and ecological harm can be corrected only when the connection between life and climate is respected.

Nutrition and life-expectancy

Linus Pauling, the 20th-century American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1954) and also the Nobel Prize (1962), believed that good nutrition can prevent 95% of all illnesses and increase life expectancy by around 20 years. Yet, a larger part begins focusing on health later than they ideally should.

Mukesh Bansal in Hacking Health discusses the connection between the body and health, advocating smart choices like nutrition, fitness, sleep, immunity, weight management, and mental health. Bansal demystifies science, debunks myths, and outlines the human body's functioning to make it efficient, fit, and happy, with good nutrition as the core of wellness.

Michael Greger and Gene Stone's How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease (Macmillan), is about using diet and nutrition for longevity. The book examines the top 15 reasons for premature deaths including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, and hypertension, and explains how nutritional interventions can frequently produce improved results than pharmaceutical drugs.

Based on scientific evidence, the authors say diets can help prevent and reverse many of the causes of disease-related death provided one realizes which foods to eat and what lifestyle changes to make. They prescribe a checklist of 12 foods, called the Daily Dozen, for healthier lives. These include a plant-based diet for the heart, hibiscus tea for high BP, coffee for liver irritation, soy for breast cancer, flaxseed for the prostrate, and more.

Diet wars

Illness, frailty, and gradual decline are viewed as inevitable parts of life. But science today considers aging to be a treatable illness. Researchers believe one can get better with age if the body is fed with the right nutrition. In Young Forever (Little, Brown Spark), Dr. Mark Hyman challenges readers to reconsider health and ease the process of aging with dietary changes.

In another book The Pegan Diet, Mark Hyman offers 21 practical principles for reclaiming health in a nutritionally confusing world. He writes how for decades, the diet wars left individuals bewildered even though extreme diet control plans may have unique benefits and drawbacks. To eat for good health, he suggests combining the best of a paleo diet (great fats, limited refined carbs, limited sugar) with the vegan diet (lots of fresh vegetables) to make a delicious vegan diet that, he writes, is good for the brain, body and the planet.

In Change, Your Schedule, Change Your Life (Harper Wave), Suhas Kshirsagar and Michelle D. Seaton argue that wellness is not about extending the life span but the healthspan as well, and for that, one's outlook on eating has to change. "It's not you, it's your schedule," the author points out, and questions habits like skipping meals, squeezing in exercises whenever convenient, working late nights to maximize productivity, and then 'catching up ' on sleep. Quoting research on chronobiology, the author says that"clock genes" control more than we understand and little changes can make a big difference to health.

For effortless wellness, Kavita Devgan gives an insight into 40 superfoods, their nutrition level, benefits, usage, and myths around these foods. In Fix it with Food (Rupa), she offers 40 quick and healthy recipes that can be added to a daily diet plan to tackle issues related to mood swings, mental stress, hormonal imbalance, fighting pollution, and boosting immunity.

The Telomere Effect (Grand Central Publishing) by Elizabeth Blackburn and Elisa Eppel brings us into the small universe of telomeres, the particular DNA-protein structures that cap each chromosome and protect genome information. Blackburn, the Australian-American Nobel Laureate, explains why the length and strength of telomeres matter, and how little changes in food and exercise can improve their health by improving theirs.

David A. Sinclair, a Genetic professor in his book '' Lifespan: Why We Age - and Why We Need To'' suggests nothing better for long-term health than being hungry a little bit during the day.